Intel’s new behemoth Xeon processors have the Midas touch

Gold, Silver and Bronze CPUs, with Platinum at the top

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Intel has revealed its new Xeon processor family, with refreshed branding and of course much improved performance, with the chips sampling now and expected to become available around the middle of the year.

The Xeon Processor Scalable range ditches the old E3/E5/E7 naming convention, instead going for a scheme based on precious metals – processors will be named from Bronze at the low-end, through to Silver, Gold and top-end Platinum CPUs.

Intel says that the new processors are a major architectural leap forward, and in fact represent the “biggest set of data centre platform advancements in this decade”, according to Lisa Spelman, VP and general manager of Intel Xeon at the company.

Power to the processors

As Ars Technica reports, Xeon Bronze CPUs will be basic entry-level processors, with Silver models offering excellent power efficiency chops, and Gold processors adding different options for advanced interconnects and accelerators, along with improved reliability.

Integrated performance accelerators will include the likes of QuickAssist Technology and Intel Volume Management Device. The latter is designed to seamlessly manage PCIe SSDs such as Intel’s new Optane drives (such as the Optane DC P4800X), allowing for ‘hot plugging’ to minimise any service downtime when swapping drives.

The king of the hill Platinum processors will offer the best performance of the lot along with hardware-tightened security.

Intel reckons that the new Xeon chips boast performance gains of around 3.9x higher virtualised workload throughput compared to a four-year-old system typically used today.

No exact specs have been mentioned yet, but we’ll doubtless know more about these chips before long given that the wide availability of the processors is slated for the summer.